Nitric Oxide, Detox, and Root Cause Heart Health: Functional Medicine Insights with Dr. Christopher Davis

Welcome back to the Senergy Podcast. Today's guest is Dr. Christopher Davis, a triple board certified integrative cardiologist and the founder of reveal vitality. Dr. Davis brings a fresh root cause lens to cardiovascular medicine, blending cutting edge science with holistic strategies to prevent, reverse, and optimize heart health. With his unique perspective, he helps patients move beyond prescriptions and procedures to discover the lifestyle, nutrition, and metabolic shift that create lasting transformation. In today's episode, we're talking all things nitric oxide, a molecule that might not make the headlines, but quietly holds the key to blood flow, energy vitality, and sexual performance, especially for men. From heart attacks to hormone imbalances, fatigue to erectile dysfunction, nitric oxide might just be the missing link. And Dr. Davis is here to break it all down for us. If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right, but still lacking energy, performance or drive, this episode is for you. Let's dive in with Dr. Chris Davis.

Dr. Davis, thank you so much for being here today. You're so generous with your time. I know you have a tremendous list of credentials behind you. Triple board certified. I want to hear your story. I think our listeners want to hear your story.

Well, thank you guys. First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm always looking for platforms to educate, and I'm always looking for platforms for people to kind of learn more about what true health looks like. And I think a lot of times what's happened in our medical system is there's a lot of miseducation out there. And I want to be part of kind of correcting a lot of the miseducation to truly help people get better. And so my story is that I'm an interventional cardiologist. I'm traditionally trained interventional cardiologists in practice for about 10 years of putting stents in all kinds of places in the heart arteries, the kidney arteries, the leg arteries. When people have vascular disease. So you have quote, unquote, these blockages in the arteries, and that's what we fix. But unfortunately, the vascular disease is a systemic problem. It's not. I have a blockage that's 70% in one spot, and we put a stent there and we fixed your problem.

Right.

There are lots of things that drive those systemic responses. And so what I quickly, real well, not quickly, I guess it took me 10 years. What I realized is that we really were not addressing the underlying root cause of this vascular disease or these blockages developing and what would happen Is we put a stent in, and six months later to a year later, the patient was back again to have another stent. And that's in spite of the traditional treatments that we had of putting them on a blood pressure medication, putting them on a statin agent, all the things that we supposed to do, and following guidelines, yet they continue to come back. It was a revolving door for me. After a while, I started to get frustrated and started to really try to asking myself, this is not working. What are we not doing here and what are we missing with respect to truly eradicating this vascular disease? And, you know, I've always been into fitness. I played football, and I was always into fitness. And so I decided that I was going to go more this nutrition route and try to kind of start to teach my patients about nutrition. So the first thing I had to do was educate myself, because I realized that I really wasn't educated on nutrition like I needed to be. And in doing that, a couple of things came up. I mean, one of the things was that most people are vitamin D deficient, most people are omega 3 deficient, and most people eat too much gluten. And so I started this nutrition program. When I looked, when I knew, I knew very little about nutrition, but I knew that those three things were things that may make people better. And so this is no joke. I started this kind of, basically, these wellness programs and the first stages of it, we're just doing those things. You put them on a little bit of vitamin D, stop eating gluten, maybe take out a few more things, take dairy out of your diet for two weeks, three weeks. But the amazing thing for me was, oh, my gosh, did these people, did their lives change? The headaches went away, their rashes went away. I had more energy, I'm sleeping better. And we used to have. I will never forget this, because this really was part of my transition is we used to have these monthly meetings where everybody that was enrolled in these programs would come and we would ask them to stand up and give their win for the month, right? What was going on with them? And I used to just sit in the back of the class, and I had my health coaches, they were up there, they were teaching the whole thing. And I was just sitting in the back, right? And we go around the room, and you would see these people, that their lives were changing in a meaningful way to the point where some of these people were in tears. And I sat in the back and I thought to myself, man, oh, man, have I missed the forest for the trees. So that started my journey, that started the passion for, okay, I got to do this a different way. And so it was shortly, it wasn't too long after that that I another practice that was just the. It was the wellness. It was a cash based practice, it was an insurance model. And I did that one day a week. And then shortly after that, it was two days a week. And then on my days that I was doing general cardiology, I was getting frustrated seeing 40 patients a day. On my other days, I was seeing six or seven patients a day, truly making a difference while seeing 40 patients a day making no difference.

Right.

And so eventually I just had them done. And I told my wife, I said, honey, I'm done with this whole traditional cardiology thing. I'm done with it. And she said, you're what? And I said, I'm done. I'm not doing it anymore. I'll figure out a different way. And so at that moment, I mean, I had. That's when the whole functional medicine training and just really educating myself on how to give more to my patients as far as helping them achieve optimal health. And so that's kind of the story. I just kind of. I literally closed my doors, walked away from it. It was challenging. Two, three years of my life. It was the most challenging time of my life because I kn, I could always go back. And you know, one of the things that happens when, you know, financially, it was very challenging. I walked away from a very lucrative career.

Yeah.

Trying to make it and do it right. But man, oh man, were times where I was like, okay, Chris. And my wife was like, okay, Chris. I made it through those times. And you know, the cool part about it though is I realized what my passion really was. And my passion was continually learning, right? To continue to learn and learn and learn and learn when you're stagnant. Like I was stagnant and cardiology, yeah, it was a great, I mean, great cardiologist, great practice, but it was stagnant. Doing the same thing every day, you know, but that learning and that passion to continue to learn and even to this day, what I do and my practice has expanded to the point I have more stuff in my practice right now that I'm doing. But it's because it's this desire to learn. And that's what drives me, right? That's what drives me every day. And that's why it keeps advancing and keeps expanding the stuff that we're doing. And so that's why I'm here talking to you guys. I Mean, I'm still a cardiologist and I still practice a lot of cardiology. I just do it a different way.

Yeah, I love that. And thank you so much for being brave enough to step outside of that model and see that things can be different. And you mentioned earlier that, well, number one, you know, we're still. Cardiovascular disease is still leading death, right? That's number one cause of death in the US Is cardiovascular disease for men and women, right?

Yep, Absolutely.

And you mentioned that cardiovascular disease, you know, these stents, the need for the stents and is a systemic problem. Let's talk. Let's dig into that because I think people need to hear that. Oftentimes they think that they're destined to that because that's what their dad had, that's what their mom had. And so they're just going to get it because of genetics. But let's dispel that and let's talk about that being a systemic issue.

Yeah, absolutely. So first let's just. I mean, this whole concept of, well, it's genetic and you have to have it because it's genetic. You know, this whole. Your genes, I'm sure you guys have heard that saying, the genes are the gun, but your lifestyle is what pulls the trigger, right? And that is so true because just because you have the genetics, like, for example, I know all of my genetics, and I have heart disease in my family. I have diabetes in my family, and I have the definitely have the genes to have hyperlipidemia. I have the genes to have diabetes, but my lifestyle is such that, you know, these genes have to be turned on and off. What's more important than your genes? All right, the epigenetics. What influences how these genes are expressed, turned on or off? And your lifestyle, really, how much. What am I eating? What am I drinking? How much sleep am I getting? How much stress am I under? What toxins am I exposed to? These are all epigenetic modifiers of gene expression. And so just because your parents had xyz, maybe there's a propensity for something, for a condition to be there, but it doesn't mean that you have to have it.

Right?

And so from a systemic perspective, what's going on in our body when we have, when we have vascular disease? I mean, it all starts with inflammation, right? And vascular damage and which then causes oxidative stress. So what is oxidative stress? I think we all know what inflammation is, but oxidative stress, I like to call it getting rusty inside. We get rusty inside, and that's kind of what oxidative stress is. If you think about a pipe of a metal pipe of 100-year-old house, 200 year old house, when we think about those layers of that orange, yellow, orange rust that kind of just builds up and builds up and builds up inside those pipes. Well, essentially that's what's happening in our arteries of our heart. As we have oxidative stress as we get older, or as we have this lifestyle that's conducive to this oxidative stress, that's what's happening. We're getting rusty inside and we're developing plaque in the arteries and thus developing vascular disease. Well, what are all those things that causes systemic inflammation? We have tons of them. I talked, we talked a little bit earlier before we came on, came on the podcast on the air. My major thing these days that causes most of our vascular inflammation and oxidative stress are all the toxins that we're exposed to in our environment, namely metals, mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, and many other metals, plastics, insecticides and pesticides. I see tons of those. Every single patient that comes to my practice gets environmental toxin tests. Every single one.

Right.

And that. And that's only been over the last three years. And it's amazing to me, like, why haven't. If you were to ask around a room or you ask patients that come through most practices, how many of you have had an environmental toxin test? Not many people would raise their hand. But I will, I'm here to tell you, I will guarantee you that if you do environmental toxin tests on most of those people, you will start to see what's causing the chronic inflammation that's causing oxidative stress that causes heart disease, neurocognitive diseases, autoimmune diseases, cancer.

Right.

It is not rocket science once you do it. And that's the thing I've learned over the last three years. So my practice is really focused on trying to eradicate these. The toxins that are, that people have and actually eradicating the exposures of these things too. So that's driving a lot of the systemic and the systemic disease. Other things are metabolic arrangements. Diabetes is obviously a major issue and not just diabetes, metabolic syndrome in general, or prediction diabetes.

Right.

We know that insulin resistance, okay. Is a major cause of vascular disease. And that is something that's just running rampant with the standard American diet. I think what's probably one of the latest numbers, 50, 60% of the people to have some form of metabolic syndrome or insulin resistance. And I think we do a poor Job of assessing that early. I think people, doctors have, traditionally we look at hemoglobin A1C or just look at glucose. And by the time the hemoglobin, hemoglobin A1C has started to go up, we've kind of missed the forest for the trees because that insulin resistance started way before the hemoglobin A1C went up.

Right, right.

So deceived in that, you know, people are told, oh, your A1C is only 5.6, you're fine.

Right.

They're fasting insulin and it's 15, 20.

Yeah, like so.

Not fine. Right.

So this is part of that education we're talking about.

Right.

People need to be asking about fasting insulin levels. I think the other thing, the beauty of this is that there's so much, so much new technology out there and I'm a big believer in utilizing some of this technology. A lot of continuous glucose monitors also have really changed the change. The whole people can see what I've learned in my patients. Compliance really changes when they can see it.

Right.

So when you start to use continuous glucose meters, and for those of you who don't know, there are little monitors that we can actually put on the back of your arm or on your skin that actually are measuring, not actually they measure blood glucose, but it's not the blood glucose, it's interstitial glucose, which is a surrogate marker for the blood glucose. But essentially they give you what your blood sugars are.

Right.

And if you can see the things that are the types of foods, the alcohol, the lack of sleep, the things that make your blood sugar rise, then, you know, and I think it's an individual based thing. The other thing that I talk about a lot is that every therapy and every approach to every patient needs to be individualized. And how the continuous glucose monitor plays into this is that, you know, some, the same food for me, for example, I thought quinoa was good for you.

Right.

It's better than rice. I should be eating quinoa because it's not going to raise my blood sugar. Well, guess what? Quinoa raised my blood sugar tremendously where the white rice didn't. Okay. And so there's so many factors that contribute to that.

Right.

My gut microbiome, my genetics. So the CGM tells me what's what.

Right.

It's not about, I don't have to guess anymore. So that kind of helps us know kind of early on too. If there is an insulin sensitivity problem or insulin resistance problem, then we have technology there that can help us understand what do I need to do to minimize my chances or control my blood sugars better utilizing this technology? So those are some of the systemic things. Blood sugar, high blood pressure, blood pressure. We got to talk about blood pressure, and we got to talk about blood pressure that's high, that nobody knows that it's high.

Right.

That happens all the time, Every day, all day.

Right.

Okay.

Most of us are walking around that.

Like, how would your blood pressure. If you're monitoring your blood pressure? I'm assuming you're talking about someone that is monitoring their blood pressure.

Well, not really people who are not monitoring their blood pressure. I mean, there's so many people who don't monitor their blood pressure because they.

They feel fine. So you're saying they just feel fine, so they don't think they need to monitor and they have blood pressure elevate. I agree with that.

How many people say, I feel fine or. Or my blood pressure is a little high, but I feel fine?

Yeah.

Okay. But okay, so. So understanding how that blood pressure is again, driving this increased vascular damage, which then again is going to cause a systemic disease and vascular disease everywhere. So I think those are the biggies that I see missed and often just kind of overlooked. Toxins, blood pressure, blood sugar, stress. Got to talk about stress as well.

Right.

Stress is real. Most people think about stress just as an emotional component.

Right.

Stress is so much more than just this emotion that you feel. This emotion is actually eliciting stress hormone release. There are actual chemicals in your body being released that are damaging your body, damaging your tissues. The catecholamines, like epinephrine and norepinephrine, they're causing vasoconstriction, making your blood pressure go higher because you're stressed. It's not just an emotional thing. There is a physiologic response occurring when you are stressed. So understanding how to mitigate stress, how to. What type of stress mitigation techniques, whether it's breath work or yoga or tai chi or whatever it is that works for you, understanding how you need take advantage of those things to improve these stress hormone levels that are elevated that can cause damage.

Yep. So what you're saying is that it's a very complex thing. Right. But there really are two of those four things that you mentioned are biometrics that they can monitor themselves. And I think I agree with you 100%. And Kelly and I and our practices really do encourage the use of wearables, because wearables have revolutionized compliance, you know, but again, Coming alongside of a qualified healthcare practitioner to help them understand those connections, too, because there are a lot of nuances in that, so it can be really, really complex. I'm just. I want to go back to something you said earlier.

Just.

Just to say it is. I'm just proud of you for sitting in the back of that room. I'm sorry, I'm taking us way back, but it's important.

I love it.

I love it.

Yeah.

You sat in the back of that room and you listen. Do you know how many practitioners would have let their coaches do that and not be there? But you were, and that says a lot about you. And in that, you. That changed your career path, and I am going to second that. That is very, very brave. And you're in very light company, because I can tell you some of the hardest years of my practice, and I think Kelly can speak to this, too, a little bit different of how we landed and what we walked through was the years that there wasn't a paycheck, a traditional paycheck. Right. Paycheck, honestly, was the value that we got back. Seeing a difference in people's lives.

Yeah, absolutely.

100 through that to where you are today. And then you're here as a result of that, doing what you do now and changing people's lives. And now the rewards are there. Right?

So absolutely. Right now, it's just trying to spread the message, spread the word.

Right?

It's about this, you know, me being involved with this company, Human. I. I told the owners of Human that. That I just want a platform to educate people. I want a platform for people to hear the story so that they can understand. Man, this is making some sense.

Right?

And I think that there's never been a better time than right now in our society. People realize that there are some. There are some things in our medical system that need to be reworked. Okay. We have a wonderful acute care system in the United States. And if somebody's having a heart attack, yeah, I'd like to be in the United States. So they could go in there, put a catheter up my arm and my leg into my heart, and fix that artery, and that heart attack is aborted.

Right.

That isn't a great acute care system. But what we lack is that management of chronic disease is problematic, because as physicians, we've been taught that here's the diagnosis and here's the medication or procedure that you need to have done. I can't tell you how often, day in and day out, that happens to me, and it's a Little frustrating. And I think that, you know, people are beginning to wake up, man. They come into me and they say, you know, they told me I had this disease and I just needed to take this medicine. There's nothing else to do. I had a guy yesterday had pulmonary fibrosis and they said, you know, there's nothing. We got three, we got two drugs that you can take for this pulmonary fibrosis and that's it.

Right.

Well, you know, did we even look at why he had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis? And I asked him, you know, what idiopathic means and he said no, they just don't know what causes it. I said no, that means we just didn't look to figure out what causes it.

Right.

And so it's that type of thing that, I mean, it happens every single day, every single day. But anyways, go ahead.

And then there's that flashing of that insurance card. Right. And the frustrating part is, you know, they're unfortunately, you know, I always say that it's kind of like car insurance. Car insurance doesn't pay to have your tires rotated or your oils chain, you know, your oil change to keep your car on the road. Well, your insurance really wasn't designed honestly for, for preventative health. Right. Wrong or indifferent. I don't think any of us out here agree to that. We don't think that, that it's a sick care system. It's, it's not a well care system. We've been trained in traditional medicine, reactive and unfortunately not proactive. And it does, it does force stepping completely out of the model. And I think a lot of our patients don't understand the risks of that, the many, many risks, the cost of that to families and relationships and so many things, but the value of doing that. And so yeah, I mean, I just think our system is really broken and we have to be out there teaching it and telling our patients honestly on a regular basis. That I don't think. And maybe you have a different opinion on this. I would love to hear it. I think that when I look at physicians or medical providers, specifically physicians, because of the amount of years that you go to school, just years and years and years and years of education. I always say to my patients, I don't feel like anyone would go through that if they didn't genuinely want to make a difference in care. I just don't. So it's not their fault. No, it's the system.

No, I agree. 100, I'd agree 100%. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. I think that a lot of times we, as we were coming through our training, I didn't, we obviously we didn't. You didn't see it then, right? You didn't see kind of what was happening and what were. You thought you were learning all the right stuff. It takes kind of, it takes some time in getting out of it. And I will say that some doctors still don't. They don't see it and they can't see where they. And I don't know why that is. I'm not sure who the doctors. How do we get some doctors who can really see, okay, there's a problem and then some that really never catch on that there's a problem, that there's a different way that they truly could be helping their patients. There's a book that I read and it was, it was written in the 1970s, but it was called oh, Medical Capitalism in America or something like that. But on the front of the book, I'll never forget it had like a bunch of, I mean this was an older book. So it had like doctors and they were wearing like the surgeon's hat with the little light thing on it. And they had them all lined up like soldiers, right? It was like 15 soldiers and they all look just alike with their little hats on. And it was basically saying how we are trained like soldiers to follow this capitalistic approach to medicine. And it talked about, you know, the whole era of Rockefeller and back into the, what was it?

The.

I can't remember the name of the thing, but back in Rockefeller and he kind of went through all the medical schools and changed it such that it was all based on pharmaceuticals and petroleum based products and took all the natural medicine away. And so once you kind of start to read that and you start to understand this whole, the capitalism of the medical, medical arena, then I started to realize, okay, yeah, this is, this is, this is about.

Right.

This sounds like how we practice medicine and this is a problem. So yeah, that wanted to wake up because I couldn't agree with you more that we just. Most doctors don't go into it with this intention.

Right.

But it's just the system and we were, we were trained by the system.

So you recognize that it was a systemic issue and you recognize some key things that drive that pathophysiology. And you mentioned toxicity. And in Lori, and my practice in central Mississippi and Lori's practice in Florida, one of the things that we help patients do is kind of, of work through a, we call it a metabolic reset It's a detox of sorts, but it's helping them recognize that they have a tremendous amount of incoming toxic burden. And then the body has a great capacity to, you know, eliminate that stuff, but we're not supporting it very well. So teaching them the foundational things to minimize exposure as best we can. We can't live in a bubble, nor. Nor do we want to, but bring product aware and then working on. On supporting the body in the way of offloading. So that's part of that. But I have a feeling that there's a burden in the body that accumulates before there's awareness, that there's need to support that. So let's get into the. Like the endothelium, the glycocalyx, and talk about how that toxicity settles there and then what. What you can do about restoring that.

Yeah.

So let's start. There's a lot to unpack there. Let's start with. Let's start with. Let's talk. Start with the toxins, and then we'll move into how the tox affect the vascular endothelium and glycocalyx. But, you know, you said it best. You know, we're exposed to toxins from the time. Well, back up before we're born.

Right.

Exactly right. I was about to say from the time we come out of the womb. But we're exposed to toxins before we're born.

Right.

Now, we now know that, you know, we've seen all the studies with when. When children are born or when we actually look at toxins from the umbilical cord. I mean, there's some enormous number of toxins. I can't remember what those. I remember when these reports were coming out, and I was like, man, I.

Think it was a 2010 study. That's the last one I know that was done. It was 283toxins found in Cornwall of normal, healthy pregnancies. Like this was not pathology. Right. So, yes.

So these toxins are. I mean, they're ubiquitous in our environment. No question about it. Now, after doing thousands of these toxin tests, they're ubiquitous, and we are exposed to them from the time we were born, before we were born. But fortunately, like you said, the good Lord gave us the capacity to deal with and get rid of a lot of these toxins or at least store them in a way such that they are not causing damage immediately in our systems.

Right.

These same toxins are what causes the inflammation and oxidative stress. Now, sometimes the toxins can, even as children, a lot of the cases of, of the autism and ADHD and ADD and all these things that we're seeing. I would suggest to you today that it has a lot to do with two things, micronutrient deficiencies and toxic load.

Right?

So we're exposed to these things from a young age. And what our body's capacity is to handle these toxins is dependent on a number of things, right? It's dependent on some of the genetics, our glutathione genes, our methylation genes, acetylation genes, it's dependent on our microbiome, our gut health.

Right?

You can't detoxify if the gut doesn't work, right? I mean, I mean we all, we, that's kind of, that's a no brainer. Like when you start to help people detoxify, you don't want to start by just kind of moving a bunch of stuff around. These toxins and they're not, and their gut's not ready for it or their liver is not ready for it, Right? The liver is that major, the major organ that's responsible for all of the conjugation and changing these toxins into a form that we can get them out. And if the liver is not functioning normally and you don't have the B vitamins and all the other nutrients that you need in the liver, guess what? The toxins are not going to come out. So really it's important that we're going to all be exposed to these toxins. There is no question. I tell people when they come to my office, I look outside and you say, see the guy out there spraying the grass with the glyphosate right there, all the roundup stuff, you're not going to, not be exposed to it. And your dog's out there rolling around in it right now. And then you bring your dog in the house and let him run around. I mean it's, we're not going to not be exposed to this stuff. And I don't care how good you try to be, but we have to try to make sure we optimize our detox pathways such that when we're exposed to these things, we can try to get rid of them as best we can. Okay?

So Dr. Davis, Lori and I were just in Florida at the Longevity Expo and we went out for a walk one, one morning of the Expo and I'm talking, you know, I'm talking and engaged with her. I'm not really, really paying attention to my environment too good. But I see this young man, very clean cut, he had a cart and he was spraying the sidewalk. I'm thinking, he's cleaning the sidewalk with a spray bottle. Like, I have no clue that he is spraying weeds. We walk right through the. Right through him. And I looked at Lori, I said, I thought he was gonna try to sell us something. Like, what is he doing out there? And she was like, I'm from Florida.

There's the weeds in the cracks of the sidewalk. You don't know that.

She goes, they don't do that in Mississippi. But we walked right through that. Breathed it all in.

Breathe it all in. Yes.

So you're right. It's everywhere. Sorry to interrupt, but I just thought that was such a good example of just. You're trying to do your best. You're out there getting your sunshine and your walk and your fresh air. And here we go being insulted.

There you go. Little did you know you were toxifying yourself as you got your sunlight and fresh air. But anyways. Yeah. So all these toxins we're exposed to in our environment and making sure we can help to get those out with optimizing our detox pathways. I will say one more thing, whether we get to it or not, but maybe this is just a good time to say it. One of the best ways to help detoxify, and everybody should hear this. This, like, the most important thing in my book these days is sauna, infrared sauna. And I recommend people use sauna if you have access to a sauna. From what I've learned over the last three years, I use a sauna seven days a week right now, just simply because of what I've seen over the last seven years and my own. My own environmental toxin panel. And so, you know, it's a great way to detoxify. We have lots of other supplements and other modalities that we can use. I mean, we can. I mean, conservative things up to much more complex things like filtration and plasmapheresis and EBO2 or starting things, conservatives just with, I don't know, a charcoal product with zeolite or fulvic and humic acid. These things can bind these toxins and get them out. So we got a whole spectrum of how we can detoxify.

You're saying you've seen your toxic burden come down since you've been using sauna consistently?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. And I got even better. Here's the story, this is true story of the hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of people in my practice. Like, when you start checking environmental toxins, it is very unusual that you don't find some toxins. There are three people. Three out of hundreds. Hundreds, again, maybe thousands. Three people who've not had any of these toxins. And all three of them had been using the sauna routinely for the last year and a half to two years, at least four to five days a week. And I have been saying it, saying it and saying it, and then when you see it happen a couple times, I'm like, man, wow. Okay, so those three, the only three people in my practice.

Right.

So.

So. So I'm a big, big believer.

And.

And the other thing that I can tell you, and I can vouch for it, is that the way I do my environmental toxin test, I use the sauna as the provocative agent.

Right.

Meaning that the difference. And I. And for the longest time, the company that I use for my environmental toxin test, I always thought something was wrong, because if I did this to me, my heavy metal sets will come back normal. With this company, they were normal, normal, normal, normal, normal. And I was like, there's no way every single one of these tests are this normal. And so I watched a couple webinars and was just some courses, and somebody had mentioned the sauna thing, and I started doing sauna. And everything changed. Everything changed. Like, even patients who had had the test before, I had them do a sauna. And then you do the toxin panel, everything changed.

Right.

So these toxins now were mobilized and they were picking up in the urine. This is actually urine testing that we were doing. So you were picking up in the urine after the sauna. And now if somebody comes in and they do a toxin test and they didn't do a sauna, I don't even look at the results, or I look at it and say, well, I can tell you that this looks okay now, or you got a couple things up, but I really don't know what it means because we didn't do the sauna, and it makes that much difference, and we'll have them do it again, and it's entirely different.

Yeah.

So I'm a big, big believer that the sauna is very effective in mobilizing toxins. And then you just have to also be able to kind of have the capacity to bind those toxins when we mobilize and get them out. So you sweat them out, which takes some of the burden off the liver, but we still want to make sure the liver and the gut are intact to make sure we kind of get these toxins out.

Yeah, yeah.

So we. We kind of. So that's a roundabout. The toxins and let's talk about now. How do the toxins cause vascular disease? Okay. And what toxins cause vascular disease? I think we, we know and we've kind of talked about. There's lots of literature on metals causing vascular disease because we, we've been checking metals for years, right? What we haven't been checking are all these other insecticides, pesticides, glyphosate, atrazine, phthalates. Those are fairly new, fairly new to the whole spectrum of checking toxins and understanding how those things affect vascular disease. There's not quite as much literature on that right now, but certainly some of that's out there with phthalates and some other pesticides and herbicides. But metals, for example, we know that there's certain metals that are directly vasculotoxic. Things like lead and mercury, cadmium are directly toxic to the vessel. And so what do we mean by toxic? They cause vascular injury. Okay. They cause damage to the lining of the inside of your vessel. Okay. And so one of the terms we want to introduce is this concept of the glycocalyx. But I want to, I want to start, though, by most people or some of the listeners probably have heard of the endothelium, okay. Heart disease. Endothelial is. It starts with endothelial damage. That's kind of one of the things that we had talked about Mark Houston earlier. Endothelial damage is kind of the nidus, or starting point for heart disease. Well, we now know that that endothelium is protected by this spongy mesh like layer on top of it called the glycocalyx. And that glycocalyx helps to protect that endothelium from being damaged by toxins, the sugars, the high blood pressure. And so it's a very protective layer. It also helps protect from things sticking to the wall, like platelets that stick together and form blood clots.

Right.

And we learned a lot about vascular disease and this glycocalyx during COVID Okay. I think Covid was an eye opening experience and opened up a whole nother. I mean, the glycochillics have been talked about, but nobody was really. It wasn't as big of a concept at that point. But when Covid came along and we started to have all these issues with clotting, right? And we started to have all these issues with uncontrolled hypertension. Probably the most common thing that I saw was uncontrolled hypertension in a patient who never had high blood pressure in their life. Pressures of 250 over 120. And you can't get the blood pressure down with three or four different blood pressure medications.

Right.

Many of them today are having some of that.

Yes. And then this is why they need to be listening to this very carefully. Okay. The reason you have that is because of the fact that that glycocalyx is totally diminished, demolished by spike protein.

Right.

So now you have an endothelial layer that's demolished and damaged and that endothelium produces. And the glycocalyx produces nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator that helps the arteries become more compliant, more stretchy, more elastic, such that the blood pressure is not high. Well, what happened with COVID is we damaged the glycocalage, which then in turn damages the endothelium. Now we don't produce nitric oxide. My vessels are stiff, right? And the vessels are so stiff, and the blood pressure is higher because of that stiffness of the vessel. You got the same amount of blood supply, the same amount of velocity of blood going through there, but a stiff vessel that's not compliant. So the pressure in the vessel is higher.

Right.

And so when, when you treat those patients with a glycocalyx product, and I saw this invariably, I even went out and bought $30,000 device to measure digital pulse analysis. Digital pulse analysis is looking at the waveforms so I could understand the compliance or the elasticity of the arteries because I knew that we knew at that point Covid was actually a vascular disease.

Right.

And I had to figure out a way, how do I measure microcirculation and how do I measure vascular compliance to know who the higher risk people are with this with COVID and what I should be doing for form, and what I saw invariably is that these vessels, the larger size vessels and these moderate sized coronary arteries, the stiffness of the vessels was incredible.

Right.

And then when you put them on a glycocalyx product, we were able to kind of normalize the elasticity of the artery again, because you've recreated this protective glycocalyx layer such that nitric oxide is being produced again to help with that compliance. So. So that glycocalyx is something that. And moving forward with respect to vascular disease, blood pressure, the number one product that I prescribe in my practice from a supplement perspective these days for vascular disease, and I still see lots and lots of cardiology patients in blood pressure, is glycocalyx product. I use a product called Glynocalyx from Human. And I mean, it's been amazing at getting people off of four or five blood pressure medications. Because you now reline this endothelium with the glycocalyx. So really, really important concept to get. If anybody out there listening is still dealing with significant issues with blood pressure, I would encourage you strongly to really look into a glycocalyx product like Glynocalyx and even potentially some other nitric oxide supporting supplements as well, which we can probably talk about in a little bit. But vascular disease is started by the injury to the vessel, which is actually damage to the glycochemic calyx. And then it's perpetuated by some of the other things we've talked about. The type of oxidative stress with. I won't say so cholesterol. And I will say this, and I got to say this the right way.

Okay.

Cholesterol by itself does not cause heart disease. But cholesterol that's modified into a form of oxidized LDL or small, dense LDL particles, a type of cholesterol that's more likely to get across that glycogen calyx into the vessel wall does cause heart disease. Right. So anybody that tells you that I don't say that cholesterol causes heart disease, but there are certain types of cholesterol molecules that certainly are contributing factors to heart disease when you have vascular injury.

Yeah. And it's an inflammatory disease state. And I love what you were saying about and how you explained the glycocalyx. The other problem that we had in Covid that I think we have actually, actually, honestly, from day to day, is the fact that inflammation in and of itself causes viscosity of blood to be really sticky. Right now you have sticky blood going through stiff, hard blood vessels, and then you have a heart that's working really, really hard to pump.

Right.

And so you end up having heart. The risk of heart disease, the risk of just all of that. It's this compounding effect. And so, and I love test. Don't guess we say that all the time, but it's always about really choosing the right test, too. I can't tell you how many times, say, my doctor says, you know, my LDLs are this, oh, I have really good HDLs. And I'm like, I think you have dysfunctional HDLs, right. Like, you don't have the right kind. And they're like, well, how do you know that? And I'm like, because we do the right test, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I can only laugh. I'M sorry? Because it's so true. I mean, this whole good cholesterol, bad cholesterol thing, you know, again, listeners, there's no such thing as good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. The things that we have characterized as good cholesterol. HDL is not all good cholesterol. Okay? LDL is not all bad cholesterol. There are some markers that we talk. Let's go back to the sticky thing for a second because this is a great segue into high risk factors. If you are looking to get a blood panel done to understand your risk of heart disease, there are several things that are really important that are incredibly major risk factors. There's a little sticky cholesterol molecule called lipoprotein little a lp, which is an LDL molecule, but it has another little protein on it called apoa. And this is a real deal risk for heart disease, coronary artery disease, heart attack. And it makes your blood very sticky. It causes plaque in the artery, and it makes the blood very sticky. It is 90 plus percent genetically. And this is one of those things.

Okay?

It is genetically. If somebody said this is genetics, this might be one of those things that I say, okay? That's the genetic.

Okay.

Because lipoprotein little A LP is 90% genetically driven. It's those patients that, hey, my dad had a heart attack at 52 and his brother had a heart attack at 46, and my granddad had a heart attack at, you know, same thing, 51.

Right.

So you need to. If you haven't had your LP done, everybody needs to have that done at least, at least once to kind of see where that level is, to see whether you are higher risk or not. I think one of the statistics I heard not too long ago, within the past six months or so, that if you look at the number of people who've actually had a LP that have come through Quest, it was less than 1% of the entire population who had lipid testing done has had an LP level done.

Right.

And that is a true risk factor for the stickiness of your blood. Another major one that we just kind of. I think a lot of doctors. I got a story about this one, but a lot of doctors will kind of just poo. Poo is homocysteine, right?

Yeah.

And there will be homocysteines of 18 or 35 when homocysteine really should be down. 8, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Right.

I try to keep it down in the less than 10 range, less than 9 range if I can. And homocysteine Is a very important marker that makes your blood even stickier, right? So now all of a sudden, if you got high, LP and homocysteine high, and, and most people will look at a homocysteine and not do anything, right?

And.

And a story I have is a guy had a. He truly had a homocysteine. He had multiple strokes and he had a homocysteine of 35.

Right.

Homocysteine a majority of the time is related to something called methylation issues and B vitamin deficiencies. So most of the time, this is one of the things that's really easy, low hanging fruit. You give them B vitamins, vitamins B2, B6, B9, B12, and the homocysteine comes right down. Well, I had started that process, right? We got the homocysteine down to 16, but then it went back up to New York and his doctor said, oh, you don't need all these supplements. These things are not doing anything. He comes back to me, you know, a lot of snowbirds here. He comes back to me in the fall and the homocysteine is back up to 32 or something like that.

Right.

So it's that type of thing. That's the kind of thing that burns me because.

Right.

This is something simple that we are decreasing his reaction, risk of stroke, heart attack, DVT because of this homocysteine and stickiness factor. And it's something easy to deal with. Not to mention we had done micronutrient testing to show all these low levels. And so it's something, it's things like that. When we talk about looking at root cause if we really want to be looking at the underlying risks for heart disease, we have to look at all those things that are truly risk. LP, homocysteine, fibrinogen levels, oxidized LDL, vascular inflammation markers like lipoprotein phospholipase, A2. I mean, they're things that really are the risk factors that most people are not even looking at.

And they're available.

Yes, absolutely.

And they've been available for a long time.

Forever. Forever.

Anybody that says, oh, those are new. I've been doing them since pretty much the start of the practice. Like, you know, and my practice is, you know, 18 or 19 years years old, if you will. You know, that is my story. You just honestly were, you know, that was my story. My LP was 300, 300 at 25 years old.

Wow.

Homocysteine was elevated, was feeling fatigued, feeling tired. 25 years old as a marathon runner.

Wow.

None of it made sense. Misdiagnosed. Oh, you're just depressed. You just had a kid. You're just tired because you're a new mom. No blood sugar was dysregulated. My entire family has some degree of cardiovascular risk. We could go into it, but, you know, that's, that's the story. And so often it's happening. And you don't have to be 50, 60 or 70 for this to be happening too. We are seeing these shifts.

Absolutely.

10 year olds, 20 year olds, 30 year olds. Like people need to have these tests done and they need to be with a qualified healthcare practitioner that can help guide them and then our other providers of care that are out there. I'm with you. Kelly will say the same thing. It's very disheartening when something is poo poo food because of biases or old stinking thinking or just lack of training, lack of knowledge because they devalue something that's very, it's, it's science based. It's there, you know, so. And it's so hard to watch that happen because people already feel, here's the physician or here's the provider of care. And you know, here is the, here are they. Right. And they feel intimidated in having some of those conversations too, which is. It's hard.

Yeah, it is. You know, it's just, you know, I think that. But this is why we have these type of platforms. This is why we're on this podcast right now.

Right?

It's for people to listen to this and for people, I mean, it's time for people to start educating themselves too.

Right?

I mean, we're, we're having these conversations so that people are listening so they can start asking the right questions.

Right.

In the world right now of the information age where we have all this access. Find yourself a physician that's going to ask all these questions. Don't feel afraid to go in, in and ask about LP and your homocysteine levels. And if they can't give you an answer, I told my mom this. If they, my, my mom, I asked her to have them get at order an advanced lipid panel.

Right.

With all these tests, all these markers that I just said, and the doctor said, well, this doesn't make any difference. It's not going to change anything that we do. And I promptly told my mom, I said, mom, you just need to find another doctor because this is not going to go anywhere. You need to find another doctor.

Right.

Because absolutely. It changes everything that you do.

Right.

If it's truly. If you're truly going to take good care of that patient. So, yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, we. I don't want to. I don't want to beat a dead horse. But, you know, again, this is really an education platform for people that are listening here. The things that you should be asking for from a vascular perspective, you know, and improving your health. So let's get back. Let's get tonight. I knew it's getting. We're getting. We can. We've already talked for 50 minutes, I think.

I know.

Yeah, we're almost out. Burning question. I see it in her eyes right now.

So I was saying we're almost out of time and I want to make sure before we end that we do talk about nitric oxide because it's something that we can improve our diet and improve nitric oxide production. There are some habits that we can do to help at least not diminish nitric oxide production. So I wanted to get into that a little bit before we close out.

Yeah, let's talk about. So nitric oxide has a very important role in our overall health, but particular vascular health. We kind of mentioned it with respect to vasodilating or kind of making our arteries more compliant or plumping them up, as I like to say, to help control blood pressure. But nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is produced in the body. It's a gas that's produced in the body that is produced in a couple of different ways. And I think I want to talk about the two separate ways that it's produced because that's really important. One way that it's produced in the body, there's an enzyme that takes an amino acid called argument arginine. Okay. And arginine is converted into nitric oxide. There are a lot of other co factors that have to be available. Vitamin C and some B vitamins, another one called tetrahydrobiopterin that have to be present for arginine to be converted to nitric oxide. So that's one way. And then the second way is what's called a. It's not an enzymatic process, but it. It actually is a process by which we consume nitrates in our diet. Foods that are high in nitrates and like leafy green vegetables, spinach, arugula, and things like beets, beetroot, they can contain lots of nitrates. And those nitrates are then converted by the oral microbiome into nitrites, which then kind of go down into the stomach. And then the acid in the stomach converts nitrites into nitric oxide. So those are the two main pathways by which nitric oxide are made. Now what happens as we get older, as we get sicker? The enzymatic pathway doesn't work as well.

Right.

That endothelial nitric oxide synthase, that's the enzyme. That enzyme doesn't produce as much nitric oxide. So we are dependent a lot on some of the nitrates and leafy green vegetables that we eat to help produce nitric oxide through that pathway. But unfortunately, a lot of us are not consuming enough, enough of these leafy greens and nitrates and beets and things like that to actually allow us to use that secondary pathway to produce nitric oxide. I'd also suggest to you part of the other issue that we've learned is that it's not even if you are eating them and you're not eating organic in the right forms of these vegetables, a lot of the nutritional value is still missing from a lot of our vegetables these days. So that's a whole nother separate problem them. But suffice it to say, the types of foods that we typically get a lot of these nitrates from from are the, the beets and the leafy green vegetables. Now if you can't consume all of those, there's always products out there. Supplements. There are supplements that are made from beetroot. Okay. Human has a product called Neo40, which has been, it was probably the first to market product for nitric oxide support. And it has both nitric bites, Beetroot, which, with the nitrates, and then all of the CO factors. The reason that I am so before I even got into functional medicine, I was actually using Neo40 to help support blood pressure before I really made my big jump because the Neo 40 was, was helping with people with that blood pressure. I think one of the things that's really key to that product, to the product is that in order for that, in the, that we talked about the enzymatic portion of it, in order for that to work appropriately, appropriately, you have to have these CO factors, the vitamin C, the B vitamins. And so Human has actually really incorporated the CO factors as well. So that now, and I don't want to get too technical, it helps to keep that endothelial, that helps to keep that enzyme, endothelial, nitric oxide synthase. It helps to keep it coupled. Meaning just keep it simple. It keeps that enzyme functioning appropriately. When you have all those CO factors, if you don't have those cofactors factors, then there's something called uncoupling of the nitric oxide synthase in the deal. And that can cause more problems than it does good. Meaning that you produce something called peroxy nitrite, which is very problematic. It is a very powerful reactive nitrogen species, or it actually produces more stress on the body because you're producing this peroxy nitrite. So we want to try to keep this enzyme functioning normally, producing nitric oxide as opposed to something made superoxide, which gets converted into peroxide nitrite. So beets, green leafy vegetables, and supplementation when needed to help support nitric oxide.

I love it.

I love that you said that about the pathway that can go aberrant. Because I think that as a provider and for the providers out there listening, one of my concerns about prescribing something like Neo40 was not knowing what pathway it would take.

Right.

Are we making things worse? Are we getting things better? So I love that you describe that so eloquently for us to understand that better and then talk about a little bit about oral health, because it is up to that oral microbiome. And that's why the Neo 40 dissolves in your mouth in order to be active. But if people are using things like mouthwash or they have poor dental hygiene and have a lot of dental things going on, what happens there?

Yeah, that's really important. You know, there's a study done looking at using mouthwash and nitric oxide dioxide levels. And clearly you need to have a specific microbiome to help convert those nitrates into nitrites. Okay. And if you have poor oral microbiome, that doesn't happen. And using mouthwash actually kills off most of the microbiome. So you're missing those specific bacteria that are important in converting nitrates to nitrites. And so certainly that. That's really important. There's a couple of studies out there about that, and I think people are now looking at also, and I haven't really started to. I haven't used any of these products yet, but there are probiotics that are specific for the oral microbiome to help with this whole production of nitrates to nitric nit. To nitrite to produce the nitric oxide. So, yeah, really important concept.

Yeah, that's right. And, you know, the challenge I've seen most recently is you start having some dentists that are dipping their toe in the water. Kind of like you did right in the very beginning. I did that too. Right. Trying a few things that worked, but they're continuing to prescribe or recommend toothpaste that still has whether it has fluoride or bleach or whatever in it, while at the same time giving the probiotics. And so when we talk about oral hygiene, it's not just mouthwash. It's about everything that you do for your oral hygiene. That even goes so far as to even talk about the dental floss and the microplastics that are in a lot of the dental floss, too. Like, we got to be looking at oral health, health, you know, as a whole, at everything that we do for the oral health. But it is so important. We hear it all the time. You know, heart, heart, mouth, heart, mouth.

Right, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And in fact, back, I mean, there's studies that actually looked at the plaque, looking at bacteria that are in the plaque of coronary artery disease at autopsy, and they found organisms that are typically mouth flora.

Right.

Thank you so much for being here. We are definitely going to request a part two and maybe even a part three because this has been so much fun. And I know our listeners are just eating this up because this is practical information that we can take home and apply and it affects every aspect of our life, not just our cardiovascular health. But we didn't even get into sexual health. But thinking about nitric oxide and sexual help for both men and women, super important. So I do want to dig into that when we meet again. So thank you so much for being here.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. That was fun.

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